Christmas Break

Christmas Break is always a good time to catch up with friends!

First of all, Merry Christmas!  

I know it's early for a Christmas cap (Unless you're Dee and you're posting like seven different Christmas caps!), but this cap came about in a slightly different way for me.  

While I no longer participate in the whole 'You Cap Me, I Cap You' caption trading at Rachel's Haven, I do like still being a part of that community.  I mainly express that on their discord server, but I also occasionally sneak in and peek around to see what's going on.  Anyway, on the Discord server Dee mentioned that they were doing their twelve days of Christmas caps again this year.  They get cap artists to sign up for the twelve days preceding Christmas and everyone posts on their assigned day.  It's been going on for years and I've watched it from afar for while.  My biggest problem is relying on my ability to cap on demand.  That's a skill that's been long gone for a long while now.  I can when I can.  When I can't, I don't worry about it because I cap for myself.  Signing up to make a cap specifically for a community I love and then NOT being able to produce.... yeah, no thank you.  

A few days pass and almost all the twelve days are picked up and Dee comes back into the Discord server and mentions they need at least one more person.  Then she directly called me and another cap artists out saying they'd love to have one of our caps under their collective tree.  Yeah, no pressure.  

Thankfully, a day after that post, I was feeling a little cappy and had found a few images that were inspiring of Christmas themed stories.  Before saying I could make a cap and would provide one though, I still went the extra effort of making the cap.  I got about 80% done, to the point that I knew I could sleepwalk through and finish it off, and then messaged Dee that I'd be happy to offer a Christmas cap.  

Once the cap was finished, I was still in a capping mood.  Since it doesn't happen often enough, I went ahead and kept on going.  And since I already had other Christmas images lined up with Christmas themed ideas, I ran with that.  

That that's where THIS image comes in.  You see, before I talk about this cap I need to say that if you want to see my Rachel's Haven Twelve Days of Christmas Cap, you'll need to see it over there.  I'll probably post it here eventually, but I'll leave it's exclusivity intact for at least the remainder of this year.  

Okay, so I started with the following image:

The thought I had when I first saw the image was of a guy that just got transformed and was being presented to his college buddy.  The smile was just creepy enough that I thought it had an air of 'forced' but also 'hypnosis' and not character death.  As I started writing it though, I realized it was the basic same premise as the Obscura I did almost ten years ago, Manipulative Step-mother.  

Not wanting to copy myself, especially on a short story that I really liked, I backed up and changed the basic premise.  The buddy wasn't there.  Yeah, he invited his friend over to his family's place but he wouldn't be there until Christmas.  And it wasn't a protective Step Mother, it was an Aunt.  And it wasn't just them, there were some cousins.  The real change came in the story telling style.  Instead of laying it out as a normal narrative, I wrote it all from the transformee's perspective as he 'wrote' to his friend.  Initially I had the cousins as girls, but I liked the idea of him being forced to be feminine around big burly guys, all to help 'her' prepare to be the best damned gift for 'her' friend.  

When I finished, I particularly liked how I left it up in the air as to the motivation of the change.  Did the 'friend' know that was going to happen to his buddy?  The Aunt and Cousisns are obviously in on it, but are they doing it for their own fun?  Revenge against the wrong person?  Transforming their nephew/cousin's friend as a Christmas gift for him?  Random evil?  Random science experiment?  There are a lot of ways it could go and it all depends on the readers initial perspective and predications.  

The problem came when I went to put the story into cap form.  Yeah, there wasn't enough room.  I didn't save it where I had it, but here's basically what it looked like (I didn't have any of the colors set, just the font and font size):

Obviously, unacceptable.  Yeah, her creepy smile was still there but it covered WAY too much.  I especially liked seeing the curve of her ass.  So this was immediately out.  I could have tried making abnormal text boxes that took up both sides and conformed to her shape, leaving just her without text over her and the rest of the background covered, but I immediately didn't like that idea.  That too felt like it would cover too much.  

Thankfully, in this day and age of AI Photoshop has joined in and has "Generative Fill".  I made the canvas bigger at the bottom, giving me more empty space to work with.  Now if this were just the side of the day bed that she's lounging on, I could have copied some of the color and texture and made that work in the old fashioned way.  But I can't make the rest of her leg.  Photoshop can. 

This is the second attempt.  The first attempt had her calf extending all the way to the bottom of the image with no ankle or foot at all.  It was... well, to be frank, it was disturbing.  Thankfully do overs are as easy as deleting the newly made layer in Photoshop, reselecting the empty area, and doing another generative fill.  

If I'm being nit picky, this isn't that good either.  Her foot is too big.  The texture on the daybed is wrong.  The daybed is abnormally tall.  But knowing that I was going to cover it up with text boxes and text, and that I was going to leave a fairly sexy image above that area free to see, I figured I was safe.  

Be honest. Did you know it was AI enhanced when you read it?  Did you recognize that her foot looked wrong behind the text?  

I know some people will use AI generated images for caps and... while I'm not fine with that, I see the appeal.  I see and acknowledge its clear advantages over using images of real people (real people that probably don't want their images used like this).  But I don't think the AI generated images look good enough yet.  Yet.  They're very close.  But for uses like this, extending a background out... I think this is a good use.  It's 'good enough' effect is fine once it's covered up with text.  

Lemme know what you think, both of the cap and of AI use.  I'd love to hear what other peoples thoughts are.  If there's enough interest I could make a full post on my more complex thoughts.  

Finally, be sure to head over to Rachel's Haven to check out all the other Twelve Days of Christmas caps.  Especially if you want to see my story involving a guy moving into a new cheap apartment with a strange rule, him bucking the rule, his fellow apartment dwellers encouraging him to be more into the holiday spirit, goth girls, Santa, Christmas Magic, a Certified and Licensed Kringle Associate' and of course the problems with calling college girls Ho Ho Ho!